This QTVR experiment was created by Phil
Brown at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Please visit my home page
for additional experiments in using the WWW in education in general and in Geology
in particular. I am interested in undertaking more projects of this sort and
have several others in various states of completion (or the lack there of).

Before going any further you should have a recent version of
QuickTime installed on your computer. Click here for a link directly to Apple's
QuickTime Page.

This 6-node QTVR movie is a walking tour of Parfreys Glen, a beautiful
natural area 45 minutes north of Madison on the south side of the Baraboo
Hills. I compiled this movie as an example of how useful QTVR technology
can be to geology. This virtual field trip will also be available as a small
stand-alone application which will link to text and close up views of the
walls of this small canyon.

Geologically, the resistant pink quartzite Baraboo Hills were an island
in the Paleozoic (Middle to Late Cambrian) sea. The sea cliffs which lay
less than a mile north of Parfreys Glen were buffeted by storm waves and
broke up, shedding coarse conglomerates in layers interfingered with the
beach and near shore sands deposited during normal weather. As you walk
into the Glen, the cliffs rise up to meet you and the sandstone begins to
show increasing amounts of coarse cobbles and boulders. These cobbles are
concentrated in the storm deposit layers.

For those of you with slower connections to this site, here is a single node
from the tour to give you an idea of what the Glen looks like. If your browser
is not capable of (or not configured for) the display of embeded QuickTime movies
you will have a blank space below with a "broken image" icon in it.
In this case click on Stop 5 320x200 (276K).

These pictures were taken with the Apple QuickTake 150 and thus suffer
from not having been made with a wide angle lens. They also lack the resolution
of PhotoCD files made from a 35mm camera. On the other hand they were taken
in about 2 hours and were immediately available for processing. The pictures
were downloaded in the field to a Powerbook 540c (thanks Randy). These pictures
were taken on Nov. 25th 1995 between 1 and 3 p.m.; the low sun angle provided
a wide range of contrast and brightness situations which were beyond the
ability of the QuickTake to compensate. The built-in flash was a great help,
those walls which were in range of the flash are clearly identifiable in
the movie. I have done some rudimentary image enhancement using Photoshop.

Thanks to Bob Boyle of Apple Computer for the loan of the equipment and
software to complete this experiment and Dave Rasmussen also of Apple for
some advice and sample templates. Thanks also to the New Media Center in
DoIT for allowing me to do some stitching and dicing. You REALLY want a
PowerPC to do this kind of work.